AnandTech’s HP Chromebook 11 Review

Chrome OS is extremely purpose built and it is something that should bring about great concern to those at Microsoft. I personally don’t have a problem with Windows 8, but purpose built is hardly a phrase that applies to the OS – at least if you’re talking about it on a more traditional PC. I suspect by the time we get to Windows 9, Microsoft will have a better answer to the critics of 8/8.1, but that gives Google and its Chrome OS partners at least another year of marketshare erosion. At the beginning of this mobile journey I remember x86 being an advantage for Intel, and we all know what happened to that. Similarly, I remember Windows/Office being advantages for Microsoft. If Microsoft doesn’t find a quick solution for making low cost Windows PCs just as well executed as Chrome OS devices, it’ll find itself in a world where Windows no longer matters to entry-level/mainstream users.

Apple’s taken over the high-end, Google is taking over the low-end, and in mobile, the company barely registers.

Your “logic” makes no sense. Just because they hold a large market share doesn’t mean they can’t lose it. The examples of fallen giants in recent years are many. Remember when Windows Mobile was the dominant handheld/phone os?

Think of it like a sinkhole. On the surface everything looks ok. But beneath the surface the foundation is eroding. Eventually what seems so solid and has stood for so long can collapse very quickly. Things are changing. The foundations MS built it’s empire on have changed. They need to change or they will collapse. Thinking otherwise is illogic. I’m not saying they won’t do it, I’m just saying it must involve serious change.

Your “logic” makes no sense. Just because they hold a large market share doesn’t mean they can’t lose it. The examples of fallen giants in recent years are many. Remember when Windows Mobile was the dominant handheld/phone os?

Think of it like a sinkhole. On the surface everything looks ok. But beneath the surface the foundation is eroding. Eventually what seems so solid and has stood for so long can collapse very quickly. Things are changing. The foundations MS built it’s empire on have changed. They need to change or they will collapse. Thinking otherwise is illogic. I’m not saying they won’t do it, I’m just saying it must involve serious change.

Your point make no sense because its backed by flawed misconceptions. Windows mobile was never dominant in handheld or phone OS’es.

Seriously you dismiss my point because I used windows mobile as an example? Blackberry? You going to dismiss that one also? My larger point stands (and you knew it) because there is more than one great example of seemingly unstoppable brands completely imploding because they didn’t adapt to quickly changing realities.

Your personal experience in a single building says little about the market (not to question your personal experience, of course).

In contrast, Acer’s president, Jim Wang, recently said, “We are trying to grow our non-Windows business as soon as possible. Android is very popular in smartphones and dominant in tablets. I also see a new market there for Chromebooks.”

It’s just a different opinion, of course, but given his title I tend to give his more weight.

A third take: I see Apple notebooks and Chromebooks quite often now, and support over a thousand Linux workstations (which replaced Windows XP PCs last year) as part of my day job at a Fortune 50 company.

So I don’t buy “Notebooks and Desktops belong to Microsoft easily for the next ten years” as necessarily true. If they can reinvent Windows to make sense in the modern heterogeneous world, they might hang on to the desktop for a while longer. But if they continue to alienate their business customers as they did with Windows 8 (and I have yet to talk to any colleague who wants to take their company there any time soon), they’ll be the next Nokia.

Sure, we’ll see. But be sure to read what I actually wrote rather than what you perhaps expected to see.

In particular, I did NOT “predict the death of Microsoft”; I pointed that your personal lack of experience seeing non-Windows systems is irrelevant, and that Microsoft’s current Windows strategy has been poorly received by large corporations.

Whether they see a market share decline over the next few years among business users depends on their ability to deliver products that add value. Their recent slate of offerings hasn’t exactly been received with enthusiasm by the corporate world.

Agreed. Windows is still dominating over 80-90% of the desktop OS market. It’s not going away any time soon.

Depends on the market.

Our local school district has under 5% Windows on the desktop (mostly principal laptops with the occasional programming lab configured to dual-boot into Windows). Every other desktop in the district is Linux.

And, there’s an initiative underway (without the consent of the IT Dept, I might add) to add 30-60 Chromebooks to each elementary school. That will bring the % of Windows down even further.

We may not be a large district (14,000 students, 2100 staff; ~5000 desktops, several thousand laptops, several hundred tablets), but we have been using alternatives to Windows for over 10 years now.

We’ve received comments from former students complaining about the use of Windows in the local university, and just how restrictive Windows is. We’ve also received comments from teachers moving to other districts about how limiting their Windows setups are (no remote access via NX, no access to home directories at other schools via SCP/SFTP, no webmail access, etc).

IOW, don’t discount the effects of “the other 10% of the desktop market”. We may only have 5,000 desktops, but we’ve put 20,000+ students through many years of use with lasting, long-term effects that aren’t noticed right away.

The first couple of years was bumpy as we had to “force” a lot of teachers to stop “teaching” the specific menu locations of things in MS Word, and instead to start teaching concepts like formatting, layout, content, etc. IOW, teaching transferable skills that can be used with any word processing suite, instead of just that one (out-dated) version of MS Word.

Not to mention, they are exposed to a lot more than just Windows + Office. When you get complaints about how limiting the university setup is (they are a 100% Microsoft shop) compared to the K-12 school district, you know you’re doing something right!

When you get complaints about how limiting the university setup is (they are a 100% Microsoft shop) compared to the K-12 school district, you know you’re doing something right!

What you mean exactly, because tbh if anyone are using any of my web-services or databases they are very locked down on what they can do. It would be the same if they were doing anything on a desktop .. no matter the OS.

If they are a PITA that thinks they need special access and has some clout with management, I give them something their own special VM … and they don’t bother me again.

Every student in the district has remote access to their full Linux desktop from home via the NX Client. Nothing similar is available at the uni. Want access to your files on the uni servers? Hope you can find a computer on campus to use.

Want a copy of the software that we use in the schools? No problem, it’s all free, and most of it is available on our downloads server; the rest is available on the Internet. Want a copy of the software they use at the uni? Better have a large bank account; even after student discounts, MS Office isn’t cheap.

Screw up a file, corrupt a file, misplace a file anytime over the past 3 years? We can recover it from backups (daily snapshots of every server in the district). Lose a file on the uni server? Hope it was in the last 2-4 weeks, otherwise it’s gone.

Those are the three biggest complaints we have so far from graduating students. There are others (like the lack of webmail at the uni), but those are the major ones.

at my university they run linux where possible, and it’s a complete mess

and office expensive?

you can buy it new for 100â‚¬, you can buy it used for 40â‚¬, if yuor uni has a deal with ms you can get it for >10â‚¬, and you can use openoffice for free (good luck with OOo if you need it to interact with other software…)

That’s very brave. If you do it as well as you say you are, that’s awesome. If teach them as well as you did with MS products( like specific menu locations of features), then you’re in trouble. Kids today are fairly adept at switching. I’m kind of surprised you got the staff to commit to it. Concepts are more difficult to teach than specific instructions based on menu hierarchy.

This is why Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Dropbox, and countless others don’t build on top of a Microsoft stack:

If you’re building something for which you’ve got great ambitions, you want to build on top of tech that you can take ownership of. Because you might just find yourself competing with Microsoft one day.

On the other hand, if you’re building stuff for corporations, knock yourself out.

e.g. I am building at the moment rest API using PHP, that will be deployed to a linux/nginx/mariadb environment on Windows once it has been through QA.

I been building stuff using everything from node.js to traditional .NET applications on Windows.

There is nothing about my development environment that needs to be unixy, for me to deploy to a unix like environment.

Also I have no idea why Microsoft are going to care if you building competing web services while you’re paying for their products. One way or another they are getting cash money out of you and if it is significantly big enough they are going to be laughing their way to the bank.

The reason people are rolling their own tech stacks because the new shiny stuff is especially for web stuff is fantastic to work with. e.g. Node.js as far as I am concerned is the best thing since sliced bread.

Of course there is cost … but normally the software costs pale in comparison to other operational costs.

Right, so you were talking about the client OS that developers use on their work stations. In which case you could just as easily use Windows, OS X or Linux. It comes down to personal preferences. If you’re doing it right you’d be running the web dev environment as a VM anyway.

If you’re doing it right you’d be running the web dev environment as a VM anyway.

Why is that so?

I have a VM for checking if I have introduced any environment problems that is close enough to production. In any case it gets tested and QA’d on a two servers that are clones of live environment, any configuration/environmental issues are going to be caught there.

Most of the time I want to work in my OS of choice, not dick about remoting into a VM.

I have a VM for checking if I have introduced any environment problems that is close enough to production. In any case it gets tested and QA’d on a two servers that are clones of live environment, any configuration/environmental issues are going to be caught there.

Why? Let me count the ways:

1) Standardised, sharable environment for developers.

2) While still allowing you to do what you please with your workstation. Instead of having IT saying that, no, you can’t have OS X / Windows / Linux because of X / Y / Z. You can BYOD if you want and nobody cares.

3) Set up and update can be automated by ops using e.g. puppet. Without affecting your workstation environment, which you have painstakingly made your own.

5) Have a VM for each tech stack that you develop for, instead of cramming everything on the same OS. I don’t need to have PostgreSQL, MySQL, CouchDB, etc. all running on the same box at the same time.

6) Catch configuration/environmental issues right away rather than later, “close to production”.

7) Maybe you are developing applications that run on different platforms and you need to test their integration. E.g. a POS that runs on Windows that needs to talk to a web service that runs on Linux.

8) Maybe you need to test applications that talk to each other over the network. Want to demo that on a laptop in a meeting? Sure, go ahead.

9) You’re free to upgrade or reinstall your workstation OS as you please. Wanna jump onto Windows 8.1 the day it’s released without having to worry whether your dev stack will survive the upgrade?

I’m sure I could come up with more.

Most of the time I want to work in my OS of choice, not dick about remoting into a VM.

Also “doing it right” is very subjective.

You can still work in your OS of choice while the code runs in the VM. We’re talking web services here. Just mount part of your file system onto the VM.

As I said it subjective, because at the moment I don’t need any of that.

All of that sounds great … if I needed it and that is why I don’t like condescending statements like “if you were doing it right” … well I am doing it right because I am releasing updates on time according to my estimates.

Also I have no idea why Microsoft are going to care if you building competing web services while you’re paying for their products. One way or another they are getting cash money out of you and if it is significantly big enough they are going to be laughing their way to the bank.

If they lose all consumer markets, it won’t be long before companies start to take alternatives seriously for future guarantee, after all the entire Windows stack now offers no compelling reason to customers beyond its market share.

It’s not difficult to run most of windows business apps on emulation layer, office included. The infrastructure is already there and all it needs is a trigger.

It’s not more limited than a tablet. You can use it for most tasks that need a keyboard (writing) and upload your work to a server (the cloud or whatever). The actual computing happens elsewhere. Microsoft’s real concern should be that Chromebooks could make Office redundant as well.

A tablet isn’t even good for its main purpose: browsing the web. Only a few Apple fanboys use them for actual work, and only because they really really want to, not because it’s suited for it at all.

The chromebook has a nice always attached Keyboard. Somethings are still easier with one. Google office has come a long way. On a good computer, I can barely tell the difference in speed between it and open office.

Well, if we’re comparing an Android tablet to a chromebook here. There is no difference in google indexing between the two. Providing the comparison to open office speed was only meant to support the idea that having a keyboard is useful.

I suppose if you are comparing a netbook running anything other than chrome os to a chromebook, then google indexing becomes something to think about. Perhaps its an argument to replace Chrome os with something like Fedora ( which is supposedly in the works even for the arm based ones). In fact, getting back to the original point, the ability to run a traditional Linux Distro ( excluding ubuntu touch which is kind of flaky), would be another reason to get a chromebook over a tablet.

Chrome is pretty ok for most people who only need a browser and a keyboard.

For me personally it’s even better: I replaced ChromeOS with XUbuntu. Those Chromebooks don’t come with Microsoft OS tax and the price point is brilliant.

I used to have Samsung NC20 11″ netbook type computer.

Cost me 300 euro 4 years ago. Was quite slow and did not play games.

I replaced it with a 170 euro 11″ acer C7 Chromebook 6 months ago. It is insanely good for the money. I put on Ubuntu (http://chromeos-cr48.blogspot.ie/) and I can even play Portal or most Steam Linux games!

And now the Haswell version is out! I will never go back to if the hardware is this good for 170 euro

Granted I am not sure if the ARM based Chromebooks run linux (probably yes) but the Celeron based Acer is fantastic

The only annoying thing is you have to press a key to enter the ‘developer mode’ at startup. If you get it wrong, it will do a restore (which takes more than 15 minutes I believe) and you’ll have to get it back in developer mode (takes a few steps) and make the Linux desktop partition the default boot partition again.

And the keyboard doesn’t have all the normal keys. I would have liked some more keys, maybe I should take the time to look into more keyboard mappings.

Everything else works great, it’s just a little ARM dual-boot netbook/laptop (ChromeOS and desktop Linux) for about 300 euros (includes shipping from Amazon.co.uk).

Because I bought mine from the UK, I needed to replace the plug of the power supply.

Granted I am not sure if the ARM based Chromebooks run linux (probably yes) but the Celeron based Acer is fantastic

Google Crouton. Not only do ARM based Chromebooks run more traditional Linux environments, but they can do so simultaneously – e.g., switch between Chrome OS and Ubuntu with a hotkey, using the same kernel, with no reboots.

My son does this, using Chrome OS as his browser and Ubuntu for his homework as a senior in Computer Science at the local university. I’m very tempted by the HP Chromebook as a result.

A Chromebook can do a few things better than a tablet, mostly things that use keyboard input. A tablet + keyboard will cost much more than a Chromebook of similar screen size and still perform worse at these tasks.

Plus, the Chromebook is automatically sync’ed into the cloud. And you can share many Chromebooks between many users, which is an important selling point for schools.

isn’t one of the reasons MS destroyed Netscape is that they could see that a browsers could become a fully fledged platform – an OS and a threat to Windows?

The open-sourcing of Netscape to become Mozilla and Google’s Chrome browsers show that MS was right. Now we have increasingly powerful tools to make Browser based applications, cloud computing etc. I’d be worried if I was MS.

To say that MS will still be dominate in desktop computing in 10 years (and this will be important)seems to me to be a very bold statement, which, would require a very reliable crystal ball – I don’t have one.

Nice review, it seems to contradict a lot of other sites on some things, except for the slow part. I suppose Samsung wouldn’t sell HP a newer chip? Sad that the hardware is almost getting back to where the CR-48 was, but it has the same problem, a slow processor. Can’t wait to see how the other new chromebooks stack up, I’m thinking of getting one for my kids.

ChomeOS uses X. In the default configuration you can install only Chrome packaged HTML5 apps.

In developer mode, you gain access to the ChromeOS package manager (Gentoo portage) which allows you to install other packages in Gentoo’s ebuild format. Besides you can create a Linux chroot like the popular Crouton. Crouton gives you an Ubuntu environment which allows you to install arbitrary Ubuntu packages.

You people have summarize a good number of the intervening dynamics that are shaping the computer world of tomorrow. Yes, I’m serious about that

Most of the people don’t take chromeOS seriously, and indeed it is a very focused and limited offering for non-hacker users. But you can do actual work with it and web platforms and tools, what you cannot do with an Android platform and its limited browser or docs client. I’ve tried to work with google docs in Android for years and it is still frustrating (it doesn’t cover sections, for instance, and the spreadsheet client is still quite crappy and unresponsive).

In fact, Ms. was quite fear of what netscape’s thin client promised. ChromeOS is the ultimate refination of such concept. It’s not going to substitute windows, but the menace, as another fellow said, is against office too. What they really want is that both final and corporate users stay on their ecosystem as much as possible, and they are making advances on it. Although they are not playing well with corporate users (hello patriot act, which denies the possibility of use google drive to a large number of non-american corporations and agencies), a damn lot of final users are turning on their windows, osx or whatever and running chrome with chrome apps.

Actually next Ms CEO has an herculean task. Given that IE11 cannot work seamessly with google docs, for instance, it’s a great opportunity for further advances of chrome inside Ms core territory